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Don't fear these foreign movies! They mean you no harm!

With the reality TV craze fostering unprecedented interest in documentaries, foreign films have become the true ugly stepchild of the movie business. Maybe you'll never be interested in plotless films by auteurs with unpronounceable names like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but if you do feel like dabbling in foreign waters, now is an excellent time. Two movies that made big impressions at the Toronto Film Festival and are about to hit theaters--one an upscale German political melodrama that's an almost certain Oscar nominee, the other a big, dumb monster movie that laid waste box-office records in Korea--work on such an immediate, visceral level that almost everyone will find them worth enduring subtitles for.

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Granted, the directors' names are still kind of cumbersome--the German film The Lives of Others is the first feature by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Set in East Germany a few years before the Berlin Wall fell, it concerns a cold, finicky Stasi operative, Wiesler (Ulrich M¸he), who's assigned to surveil the country's most celebrated playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch)--not because Dreyman has done anything suspicious but because a government honcho wants to move in on the guy's hot actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck). (Imagine Joseph McCarthy trying to prove that Arthur Miller is a Communist just so he can bang Marilyn Monroe.) Wiesler bugs every inch of Dreyman's apartment and takes up residence in the building's empty top floor, quietly eavesdropping. As it turns out, Dreyman is up to something subversive. But is it possible to observe a man 24/7 without beginning to identify with him?

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A few critics objected to Schindler's List on the grounds that focusing on one noble Nazi and the few hundred Jews he saved somehow sullied the memory of the millions who died. Those contrarians won't like The Lives of Others any better, especially since Wiesler, unlike Schindler, isn't based on a real person. But even if the film's view of human nature is overly optimistic, it's a beautiful lie, one worth disseminating and encouraging. M¸he captures both the pinched, ferrety quality that makes Wiesler a first-rate interrogator--the opening scene is a tour de force of genteel intimidation--and the tiny cracks in his facade that, once breached, impel him to risk everything for a virtual stranger. But the real power of this relentlessly gripping, deeply moving picture derives from its stubborn conviction that any one of us, if watched closely, could be Schindler's little girl in the red coat.

Speaking of children swallowed up by pure evil: The Host is about a giant mutant tadpole that emerges from the Han River in Seoul and starts devouring everything in sight. Remember how alarming it was a few decades ago when we turned around and suddenly the Japanese were making better cars than we were? Get ready for another bout of national mortification, because The Host makes just about every recent Hollywood thrill ride look anemic. The first appearance of the creature, in particular, rivals early Spielberg for visual imagination and brio--though where Spielberg sent pulses racing in Jaws by keeping Bruce the shark mostly out of sight, Bong Joon-ho works more via deflection and misdirection. His cagiest move is to introduce the monster almost casually, showing it full on as it galumphs its way through a crowd of screaming picnickers; it's such a startling, surreal moment that subsequent shots, in which the monster is seen out of focus or in the corner of the frame, possess a doc-style immediacy, as if they've been captured on the fly by someone with a cell-phone camera.

As a bonus, The Host offers something to both sides of this country's fractured body politic. The Left will likely seize upon the film's prologue, in which an American military officer orders gallons of formaldehyde dumped into the Han River (which actually happened), and on the Korean government's unfounded insistence that those who came in contact with the monster during its initial rampage have been exposed to some virulent disease. The Right, on the other hand, will appreciate Bong's family values, as the main narrative involves a layabout father (Song Kang-ho) who enlists his own dad and both siblings to help him save his young daughter, whom the creature has dragged into the sewers to save for a midnight snack. But while The Host has both pointed satire and frantic pathos in spades, it's also the kind of movie that establishes one of its characters as an Olympic-class archer whose fatal flaw, costing her the gold as the movie begins, is her inability to release the arrow before the clock runs out. That kind of giddy foreshadowing is a language that anybody can understand.